Re: speed up large library linking

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 10, 2005, Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:

> * Ralf Wildenhues wrote on Mon, May 09, 2005 at 10:58:01PM CEST:
>> - rewrite piecewise old archive linking

> While reading the GNU ld manpage:
> | A number of modifiers (mod) may immediately follow the p keyletter,  to
> | specify variations on an operation's behavior:
> | [...]
> | S   Do not generate an archive symbol table.  This can speed up  build-
> |     ing  a  large  library in several steps.  The resulting archive can
> |     not be used with the linker.  In order to build a symbol table, you
> |     must  omit  the S modifier on the last execution of ar, or you must
> |     run ranlib on the archive.

> Is there any reason we don't use this?  Should I hack up a patch for it?

I don't think so, and Yes, please!, respectively :-)

While at that, how about losing ranlib when ar already does its job?
Ian Lance Taylor suggested we could test for this by creating an
archive with ar, no ranlib, and trying to link an executable that
pulls symbols from the archive.  We should probably make sure the
symbol we bring in form the archive isn't available if the archive
isn't linked in (e.g., from libc), just to be paranoid.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   address@hidden, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  address@hidden, gnu.org}